by westlakehistory.info
Accessed: 8/16/19
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.
Ernest Westlake was born in Hampshire, England in 1855 to evangelical Quaker parents, Thomas Westlake (1826-1892) and Hannah Neave (died 1857). While remaining a faithful, if unorthodox Christian, Westlake eschewed much of his upbringing to become a scientist who believed in spiritualism and psychical phenomena and who was dedicated to the Darwinian-inspired theories of evolution. These beliefs also informed his later interests in educational reform.
Westlake studied at University College London from 1873-1875 where he was awarded certificates in geology and mathematics. While he never joined the academy and published relatively little of his work, Westlake was a skilled geologist who carried out meticulous and professional work. He was a member of the Geologists’ Association (1877), and elected a Fellow of the Geological Society of London (1879), a founding member of the Hampshire Field Naturalists Club (1885) and Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society (1910).
From the late 1870s Westlake studied the geological strata of Hampshire and beyond, visiting newly-made rail and road-cuttings, wells and quarries, and the cliffs of southern England, Ireland and parts of France resulting in a significant collection of fossils (many echinoids) that are held in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Some of Westlake's chalk fossils are also held in the Salisbury Museum where he was an Honorary Curator of Geology. Westlake also collected many thousands of palaeoliths and eoliths mostly in the Hampshire region, including Woodgreen and Breamore, and further afield, which are also held in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Ernest Westlake's English geological work advanced, or was referenced, by geologists including Clement Reid, William Whitaker, H. Osborne White and Jukes Browne.
Westlake’s scientific interests extended beyond geology. A founding member of the London-based Society for Psychical Research, Westlake researched phenomena of dream premonitions, haunted houses and also a history of water divining.
By the late 1880s Westlake had embraced an alternative lifestyle, travelling by a traditional horse-drawn ‘Gipsy’ caravan when collecting artefacts, becoming a keen cyclist and camper and advocating the benefits of exercise, fresh air, freer clothing and a meat-free diet. Westlake married Lucy Rutter in 1891. They had Aubrey in 1893 and Margaret in 1896. Following a slow deterioration in her health, however, Lucy died in 1901.
Four years later Westlake took cycling holiday in France with his daughter Margaret. In Aurillac, in the Cantal region, Westlake discovered a substantial deposit of eoliths: stone implements he thought were made by humans, or human ancestors, from the Miocene epoch, two million years ago. The idea of an ‘Eolithic’ epoch had first been proposed following finds of early Quaternary and Tertiary stone implements in France in the 1860s. For such scholars ‘eoliths’ revealed an important evolutionary stage in tool-making; for others they were merely broken rocks. Westlake returned to England in 1906 after unearthing about 100,000 artefacts, although French customs, concerned that he was removing the soil of their country, allowed him, as several biographers have noted, to take home about 4000 (although, according to list of his collections formed in 1923 for insurance purposes, Westlake had brought back 7000 eoliths from France. [For more information see: WEST00356 'Correspondence: French Collection 1923-1993 part 2' and WEST000040 'Notes regarding French 'eoliths' and geology' in Rebe Taylor, with Michael Jones and Gavan McCarthy, Stories in Stone: an annotated history and guide to the collections and papers of Ernest Westlake (1855-1922), The University of Melbourne eScholarship Research Centre, 2012.]
In 1908 Westlake saw a display of Tasmanian Aboriginal stone artefacts in the British Museum and was struck immediately by their similarity to his French eoliths. He was convinced that the modern (if by then widely considered ‘extinct’) Tasmanians were representative of an Eolithic stage of culture. While divided by millions of years and thousands of miles from Miocene Aurillac, Westlake believed a collection of Tasmanian artefacts would authenticate his French eoliths. Westlake was not the first or only eolithologist to see comparative similarities between European eoliths and Tasmanian stone implements, but he was the first to go to Tasmania to form his own collection, which remains the largest single collection of Tasmanian stone artefacts; a total of 13,033 (This number mostly includes the stone implements Westlake collected between 1908-1910, but it also includes the collection of J. V. Cook of Hobart, formed before Westlake went to Tasmania and as well as stone implements collected by Joseph Paxton Moir on Westlake's behalf, all of which were and sent by Paxton Moir to Westlake after his return to England [See: WEST00038, 'Correspondence from Joseph Paxton Moir to Ernest Westlake' and WEST00039, 'Correspondence concerning shipping stone tools 1912-1916 (letters from Joseph Paxton Moir included)', Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Westlake Papers.]
Westlake never published his Tasmanian or French findings. Deeply affected by the outbreak of War in 1914, he successfully established, with the assistance of his son, Aubrey Westlake, and the influence of Ernest Thompson Seton, an alternative and pacifist scouts' movement for girls and boys called the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry in 1916. The Order promoted an educational model that remembered the major cultural evolutionary stages of human development. It is still in existence today, and it is in fact for this achievement that Westlake is best remembered.
Westlake’s plans to return to his geological work following the Order’s establishment were abruptly ended when he died in the side car of his son’s motorcycle in Holborn, London in 1922. For details of what happened posthumously to Westlake’s French and Tasmanian collections, see the chronologies of his Tasmanian, French and English collections.
_______________
References:
Baden-Powell, D. F. W., 1955: 'The Suffolk Crag', Transactions of the Suffolk Naturalists Society, 9(3): 1-8 . [images 117-121, images 117-121, WEST00362, Series 15, Westlake Archive, Oxford University, Natural History Museum].
Balfour, Henry, 1893: The Evolution of Decorative Art, London, Percival & Co.
Balfour, Henry, 1925: 'The Status of the Tasmanians Among the Stone-Age People', Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, 5(1), 1-15. [images 105-116, WEST00362, Series 15, Westlake Archive, Oxford University, Natural History Museum].
Balfour Henry, 1929: 'Stone Implements of the Tasmanians and the Culture-Status Which They Suggest', Report of the Hobart Meeting of 1928, Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, 314-322.
Cove, John J., 1995: What the Bones Say - Tasmanian Aborigines, Science and Domination, Ontario, Carleton University Press.
Delair, Justin B., 1981: 'Ernest Westlake (1855-1922), Geologist and Prehistorian with a synopsis of his field notebooks', The Geological Curator 13(2&3), 133-152. [images 5-39, WEST00362, Series 15, Westlake Archive, Oxford University, Natural History Museum].
Delair, Justin B., 1985: 'Ernest Westlake (1855-1922) Founder Member of the Hampshire Field Club', Hampshire Field Club Archaeological Society, 41, 37-44.
Edgell, Derek, 1992: The Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, 1916-1949, as a New Age alternative to the Boy Scouts, Lewiston, New York, The Edwin Mellen Press.
Flanagan, Martin, 2002: In Sunshine or in Shadow, Sydney, Picador Pan Macmillan.
Hutton, Ronald, 1999: Triumph of the Moon, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Hoare, Philip, 2005: England's Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia, London and New York, Fourth Estate.
Holdsworth, Chris, 2004: 'Tylor, Sir Edward Burnett (1832-1917)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36602, accessed 3 May 2010
Jones, Rhys, 1971: Rocky Cape and the Problem of the Tasmanians, PhD thesis, University of Sydney.
La Rue, Hélène, 2004: 'Balfour, Henry (1863-1939)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30557, accessed 10 May 2010.
McNiven, Ian J. and Russell, Lynette, 2005: Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Poples and the Colonial Culture of Arhcaeology, Oxford, AltaMira.
Murray, Tim, 1992: 'Tasmania and the Consititution of the "Dawn of Humanity', Antiquity, 66, 730-743.
Plomley, Norman J. B. 1976: A word-list of the Tasmanian Aboriginal languages Launceston, in association with the Government of Tasmania.
Plomley, Norman J. B. 1991: The Westlake Papers, Records of Interviews in Tasmania, 1908-1910, Launceston, Occasional Paper No. 4, Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery [images 98-178, WEST00345, Series 1].
Roth, Henry Ling, 1890: The Aborigines of Tasmania, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Truber & Co.
Roth, Henry Ling, 1899: The Aborigines of Tasmania, Halifax, F. King and Sons.
Sollas, W. J. [published as 'W.J.S.'] 1923: 'Obituary for Ernest Westlake', Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 79, 1xii.
Sollas, W. J. Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives, Macmillan and Co. London, 1924 (third edition) .
Stokes, Robert, B.: 1977: The Echinoids Micraster and Epiaster From the Turonian and Senonian of England, Paleaontology, 20(4), 805-821, plates 106-109.
Taylor, Rebe, 2004: Island Echoes: Two Tasmanian Aboriginal Histories, PhD Thesis, History Program, Australian National University.
Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1893: 'On the Tasmanians as Representatives of Palaeolithic Man', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Britain and Ireland, 23, 141-152.
Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871: Primitive Culture: Researches into the Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom, London, J. Murray.
Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1900: 'On Stone Implements from Tasmania: Extracts from a Letter by J. Paxton Moir', The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 31, 257-259.
Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1964 (first edition 1865, this edition republished from the 3rd edition, 1878): Researches into the Early History of Mankind, edited by Paul Bohannan, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press.
Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1994: The Collected Works of Edward Burnett Tylor, London, Routledge & Thoemmes.
Westlake, Aubrey, 1917: Woodcraft Chivalry, Weston-Super-Mare, Mendip Press Ltd. [WEST00035, Series 1].
Westlake, Aubrey, 1923: 'Ernest Westlake. A Memoir of the "Father of the Order". Pine Cone, 1(1), 4-11.
Westlake, Aubrey, 1956: 'A Centenary Tribute to Ernest Westlake, An Educational Pioneer', The Woodcraft Way, 24, 3-15.
Westlake, Aubrey, 1976: 'Biographical Notes on Ernest Westlake', WEST00012, Series 2, Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Westlake Papers.
Westlake, Aubrey, 1979: An Outline History of the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry 1916-1976, The Woodcraft Way Series, 25, The Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, London.
Westlake, Ernest, 1888: Tabular Index to the Upper Cretaceous Fossils of England and Ireland, Fordingbridge, Titus Mitchell . [images 40-67, WEST00362, Series 15, Westlake Archive, Oxford University, Natural History Museum].
Westlake, Ernest, 1883: 'The Early History of the Neighbourhood as Written in its Rocks', in Reginald St. John Hannen's "Notes on the Neighbourhood and Town of Fordingbridge and Hants." in Mitchell's Fordingbridge Almanack, 1884, 1-55. Re-published in 1887, 1889 and 1908, with additions. [The 1889 edition is in: images 68-84, WEST00362, Series 15, Westlake Archive, Oxford University Museum of Natural History].
Westlake, Ernest, 1902: The Antiquity of Man in Hampshire: Notes on Recent Discoveries in the Valley of the Avon', in Kings Fordingbridge Alamanac, Fordingbridge, W. H. King and Co. [images 85-91, WEST00362, Series 15, Westlake Archive, Oxford University Museum of Natural History].
Westlake, Ernest, 1921: Recollections of Recapitulation (a Paper Read at the January Folkmoot, 1921), The Woodcraft Way Series, 7, 19-24.
Westlake, Ernest, 1921: Camping as a Prime Element in Education (a paper read at the Simple Life Exhibition, 1921), The Woodcraft Way Series, 7, 24-28.
Westlake, Ernest, c.1921: The Forest School and other Papers, The Woodcraft Way Series, 7, 8-19.
Westlake, Ernest, 1925: 'Recollections of Recapitulation', Pine Cone, 2(7), 87-90.
Westlake, Ernest, 1925: 'Recollections of Recapitulation', Pine Cone, 2(8), 122-125.
Westlake, Jean, 1977: Sandy Balls For All Seasons, Gods Hill, Fordingbridge, Hampshire, Sandy Balls Press . [digitised in part: images 50-54, WEST00363, Series 15, Westlake Archive, Oxford University Museum of Natural History] and also [partially imaged; images 12-17, WEST00345, Series 1]
Westlake, Jean, 1983 (Second edition 1988): A Handbook for Sandy Balls, Gods Hill, Fordingbridge, Hampshire, Sandy Balls Press [images 18-54, WEST00345, Series 1]
Westlake, Jean, 1982: Gipsy Caravan: A 100-years' Story, Godshill, Fordingbridge, Hampshire, Sandy Balls Press [images 55-97, WEST00345, Series 1].
Westlake, Jean, 2000: 70 Years A-Growing, Stroud, Gloucestershire, Hawthorn Press [partially imaged; images 1-11, WEST00345, Series 1].
Westlake, Margaret, 1918: The Theory of Woodcraft Chivalry, The Woodcraft Way Series, 2, 11-27.